Tonspur Passage
Soundtrack 42: Peter Weibel – Life in the 20th century: 225 million murders
13.06.11 – 20.08.11
Centuries for the victims
“To relate about the infinity of death within the space of a few minutes by counting the number of dead is art’s ploy of depriving death of its totality” (Weibel)
For Peter Weibel, the well-known neo avant-gardist, silence and repression in art is a kind of defence mechanism. As a political artist, Peter Weibel lets his art, texts and lectures take a critical look at structures of state power, perceptions of democracy as well as mass media’s ambivalent role. He criticizes art’s complicity in the 20th century with its attempt to infinitely repeat exchanging representation and reality: art must stop serving as a vanishing point for transcendence and rituals.
Peter Weibel’s latest work on power and violence “Life in the 20th century: 225 million murders” (2011) is composed of a series of mixed media installations. In May, he presented an installation in Strasbourg (De la réalité virtuelle à la réalité augmentée, Apollonia), in which an iPhone - its screen content together with augmented reality - creates a connection between real and virtual space, providing the viewer with detailed information about political murders. The viewer has the option to target 10 freely flying virtual globes with mobile devices and access data on political murders, people killed in wars, genocides, etc. which all occurred between 1900 and 2000. Each of the 10 globes symbolizes one decade of the 20th century.
Weibel installed another variation of this series – an oratory with an infinite loop 8-tone sound installation – at Vienna's MuseumsQuartier for the 42. Tonspur-Passage (42. Soundtrack Passage). A female and a male voice read out the number of dead, where they were killed and the official name of the massacre. It would take several centuries to acknowledge each name of those murdered, therefore the 225 million dead are listed in a nameless statistic. The oratory was dedicated to the innocent victims as an “acoustic monument” (Weibel). Their lives are synonyms for death. A violent death, carried out for political reasons, is actually a double murder – something Peter Weibel defined as “real and symbolic”, because “politically murdered (…) die infinitely often.”
By Romana Schuler
Tonspur Passage
1070 Vienna, Museumsquarter/quartier 21
http://www.tonspur.at
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